Wireless Printing for the WiFi Unabled–Here’s How

You can give your old printer wireless abilities without paying a dime. True story. Someone I know and love recently scrapped a nice photo printer–only a couple years old–and bought a completely new one with built in WiFi because he wanted to have the ability to print from his iPad. Little did he know, if you just hook up your old non-WiFi printer to the router, you will have that same wireless printing capability. Don’t give up on the printer just because it doesn’t have innate WiFi skills, people!

How to Access Your Router Settings: You must be able to access your router admin page in order to change any settings or set up a printer. Most routers have a sticker somewhere on its body that will tell you all the pertinent information you need to access the admin page. If you removed that sticker for some reason, try Google. Google knows everything.

Type your LAN IP into your browser’s address field like you would any other web address. It should look like this: http://152.243.3.1. You don’t even have to type http:// if you are feeling lazy.

You will be prompted to input the default admin ID and password, which should also be listed on the sticker on your router. If you’ve set up your own password and ID to get into the router admin page…hopefully you remember what it is or have it written down somewhere.

Once you type in the correct credentials, you should have complete access to all your router settings.

How To Set up Your non-Wireless Printer on Your Wireless Network: The easiest way to do this is to connect your printer to your WiFi router via USB.

Unplug the printer from the back of your PC and plug that same cable into your router instead, assuming your router has at least one USB port. Most routers do.

From here on out, keep in mind that different router makes will have different looking sites, but it should have similar options. Keep your mind open if your options don’t show exactly the same verbiage.

Click on Network Printer Server. You will probably need to download and install a router specific application in this process. If so, it should have a link right on the Network Printer Server page to get the download.

Once you’ve downloaded the file, extract it.

Double click on the extracted file and select Run.

It should finish setting up the printer on your router.

Once you finish this process you should see this printer as an option when you go to print options. If you don’t see it, especially if you haven’t used this printer previously with whatever device or computer you’re printing from, you might be required to download and install the printer driver. Sometimes your computer does this automatically. If this is a mobile device, look in the google play store.

Enjoy your old—but newly wireless—printer.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I receive compensation if you make a purchase using the links.

I’m a technological enthusiast with a completely unrelated degree in English Literature. I’ve also been known to dabble in photography and DIY furniture refinishing, with occasional stints of fitness sprinkled among all of the above.